Stopped watching at episode 224.Never owned a synchro card.Which series should I watch to passively catch up on the rules? Are they somehow balanced, or do they mostly focus on the last summon gimmick?
>>284773655You're better off playing Master Duel or something if that's all you're concerned about.
You should watch Toei, DM, and GX so you know what's going on. 5Ds is good and technically in the same continuity at least in the anime but contains dumb retcons And the english dub is so butchered as for the character relationships to be unparseable. Zexal is very good but is unambiguously a different continuity and there is no really good uncensored encode. Arc-V is truly skippable, it's complete ass, the "2nd season" is almost the entire show, and the changes it made to the real-world card game were walked back. Vrains is pretty good but the protagonist spends the first season without friends which seems like a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding of the franchise. Sevens and Go Rush aren't even taken seriously by their creators, pretend they don't exist. Dunno about the card game haven't played much since 2018, your questions would probably actually be better answered by /tg/.
>>284773655>>284773794You should really be playing something like Legacy of the Duelist (Link Evolution) since it was literally designed to rope in anime boomers and teach them mechanics while showering them with nostalgia.The anime series rather fail as educational tools I'm afraid.
Are you looking to get into the anime of the game?
https://youtu.be/MOW7rnjRPfM
>>284773655If you absolutely insist on learning the game through anime, here's a totally objective and unbiased review of the series from a gameplay standpoint.>DMIn the early arcs, the rules were initially thoughtless bullshit made up by a midwit who just wanted a MTG clone in his manga. Kaiba's tournament introduced "Battle City Rules" which brought it closer to the IRL "Expert" rules, and later arcs would shill new card releases and their mechanics, though the author continued to just make shit up for "epic" duels instead of using the actual rules and cards to do so. Broken/banned cards abounded. Of course, the rules are hopelessly outdated now.>GXContinued the trend towards more serious and consistent rules, and duels became a bit more technical. Archetype decks also became far more common than the ragtag decks used previously. I think that's when "duel writers" really took charge, who are tasked with plotting out suspenseful and engaging duels using existing (or upcoming) cards and their actual effects instead of just asspulls. Because of the inherently slow nature of the game back then though, they still had to overuse broken/banned cards, every other turn started with the protag somehow drawing an entire new hand so he would have enough cards to turn things around. Very focused on Fusion summoning. Used "New Expert Rules" (later Master Rules) which were basically the standard for a decade with some tweaks. These rules are again way outdated.>5D'sContinued the trends and introduced synchros. This was when the meta picked up speed and increasingly relied on cycling materials, chain summoning extra deck cheese and hand traps as the modern game does. However most duels in the series were using the bullshit "Riding Duel" rules, which made for cool card games on motorcycles but significantly differed from the IRL rules. It was also exclusively focused on its new summoning mechanic.
>>284776666>ZexalContinued the trends and introduced Xyz. Very polished and faithful series when it comes to the "real" gameplay at that time, so if you want to learn the game rules from the golden era it's a good entry despite the exclusive Xyz focus, but like the others it's quite outdated.>Arc-VIntroduced Pendulum Summoning and accompanying tweaks to the rules. Unlike previous series it made a show of "visiting" each summoning mechanic, so it's fairly complete. However many duels in the show are bullshit "Action Duels" where you run and jump around to pluck bonus cards from the environment, and many others are Tag Duels with absurd unplayable rules, so it's actually pretty distanced from IRL duels.>VRAINSIntroduced Link Summoning and the "New Master Rules" which are essentially the ones used to this day. The duel writing is pretty hardcore, in fact they're probably a bit guilty of making it too technical and filtering out casuals, but that makes it a great series to learn the current rules and cancerous modern meta (not like there's any other one.)However half the duels in the show are actually "Speed Duels" mirroring Duel Links rules, with significant departures like a shrunken field. The Master Duels are faithful though, despite its strong focus on Link summoning obviously.>Sevens and Go RushThese are reboots meant to introduce the new Rush Duel card game and rules, which aimed to make a simpler and faster game closer to oldschool Yugioh and way more fun to play (and also reprint thousands of cards in Rush format), but I must insist that it's basically a totally different game from the usual competitive Yugioh that most nerds still play. On the other hand if you're a DM boomer then it's probably the game you would have loved Yugioh to be. Only Sevens is really necessary to learn the core rules and gimmicks but Go Rush introduces a couple of new gimmicks as well.
>>284773655>Which series should I watch to passively catch up on the rules?If this is your only concern then you should watch Vrains as they use Fusion, Synchro, XYZ and Link summoning on that show. Personally I recommend 5D's as it is the most hype show. Ignore SEVENS and GO RUSH, that shit is not yugioh.
